Rosamond McKitterick on Europe’s 8th-9th century Carolingian foundations
‘The practical significance of the written word’, institutional development, social complexity
Rosamond McKitterick wrote:
CHAPTER 25: EIGHTH-CENTURY FOUNDATIONS
… The eighth century is to be understood not merely as a tail end of the four centuries of change and innovation which divide the world of Augustine and Jerome from that of Alcuin and Charlemagne, but as a time of new developments and fresh beginnings. Substantial foundations began to be laid all over Western Europe, in the Frankish kingdoms, Spain, Italy, Anglo-Saxon England and Ireland … There was some degree of continuity throughout the period from the fifth to the eighth centuries. Before the eighth century, distinctive intellectual contributions were made by many individuals such as Boethius, Cassiodorus, Gregory of Tours, Caesarius of Aries and Isidore of Seville. Learning became increasingly the prerogative of monastic and cathedral centres. There was a shift in emphasis from secular and classical to Christian knowledge and texts. Yet among the difficulties in assessing eighth-century developments are the nature of the evidence and the criteria employed in assessing levels or areas of cultural activity. The latter have to be understood within the framework provided by an educational curriculum in the form in which it survived into the early middle ages, and by the Christian authors and writings which served as its bedrock.
It is the extant manuscript evidence above all which enables us to document precise topics of interest, the contributions of individuals and the degree of innovation. Thus this crucial category of evidence augments what is known from texts and authors whose original manuscripts no longer survive. In many cases, apart from the liturgy and canon law, we are admittedly not dealing so much with the creation of new work as with the transmission and augmentation of existing knowledge. We can observe how the technical mastery of literate skills was disseminated, how libraries were formed, and how centres capable of copying books were established. Without this fundamental framework, nothing subsequently would have been possible; it is vital that we do not underestimate its importance. The manuscript evidence can be exploited to shed light on the intellectual and religious vigour of a period. It provides some idea of the number of scribes trained to copy texts, the books copied, the books available and the contacts formed between one centre and another, often in different regions. The forms of the letters themselves can reflect the diverse influences present. …
… Not all intellectual energy in the eighth century was channelled into Christian education and learning, however. This was also a dynamic period in the formulation and revision of secular laws, and we can observe in relation to this the increasing resort to the written record in legal transactions and disputes. To the impressive base provided in the mid-seventh century by Rothari, king of the Lombards, for example, were added many new provisions and judgements by Kings Liutprand and Ratchis, who had particular concern for the rules of inheritance and abuse of power by iudices. Lombard law occasionally shows that Roman practice, especially in the laws of property and possession, the notion of the state and its administrative role and the distinction between public and private, made some impact. Among the Franks, a redaction of the sixth-century Lex Salica was put together early in the reign of Pippin III. The Lex Ribuaria, compiled in Austrasia in the mid-seventh century, of which the Carolingian mayor issued his own recension in the mid-eighth century, provides a crucial context for the subsequent assumptions and procedures of the Carolingian mayors of the palace and Austrasian nobles in the conduct of legal business. They make room in particular for the use of written documents in a number of important instances.
Other laws appear to have been formulated either as a result of Frankish initiative or as a form of assertion against the political dominance of the Francs. The Lex Baiuuariorum, for example, was promulgated under Duke Tassilo between 744 and 748 before he was crushed under his uncle's and cousin's expansionist greed. A remarkable prologue to the Bavarian laws called attention to the legislation of the Hebrews, the Greeks, the Egyptians and the Romans, and cited by name the great law-givers of history such as Solon, Lycurgus, Numa Pompilius, Pompey, the 'authors' of the Twelve Tables, the Caesars, Constantine and Theodosius. It provided a definition of 'custom' and 'law' and evoked the law-giving of the ancient Frankish kings. The pactus legis Alemannorum was drawn up in the early seventh century, but the Lex Alemannorum, compiled about a century later, may be expressive of a brief period of independent power on the part of the dukes before 724. …
… The Edict of Rothari, the Liber ludiciorum of the Visigoths was promulgated in the mid-seventh century. Similarly, subsequent rulers, notably Erwig in 681, and Egica and Witiza, revised and added to it. The effect of the legislation was to make Roman law in the Visigothic kingdom redundant; the Liber ludiciorum has been characterised, rightly or wrongly, as the first territorial law-code of early medieval Europe, which applied to all inhabitants within the kingdom irrespective of racial or cultural affiliations.
New laws were formulated, moreover, which sought to contain a possible abuse of power on the part of the king, defined a distinction between personal property and property pertaining to the office of king, and explicitly subjected the ruler to the law. This body of laws remained that consulted by judges in the Christian kingdoms of northern Spain after the Arab conquest in 711. Roman law, however, as the number of manuscripts of the Breviary of Alaric available in the eighth century attest, was still widely in use in early medieval Europe. The Breviary, a Digest of the Theodosian Code compiled in southern Gaul at the beginning of the sixth century, continued to provide a source for Roman legislation and Roman jurisprudential ideas throughout the ninth century as well. In many of the early 'Germanic' codes there are indications of a knowledge and application of Roman principles on many topics. There is also evidence of an attempt to accommodate, if not Christianity itself, then certainly the needs of the Christian church, into the framework of the laws. This is particularly evident in the laws of the earliest English kings … Yet the English laws differed in that, unlike their continental counterparts, they were, although consciously emulating Roman example, written in a Germanic vernacular. In Ireland too, problems of secular law and thinking about legal questions concerning power, rights, status, the enforcement of law, property, authority and the distinction between public and private are all embodied in a series of vernacular Irish tracts compiled in the seventh and eighth centuries and apparently comprising statements of customary practice.
Thus a great deal of thinking about status and power in the course of the seventh and eighth centuries was embodied in these legal compilations. They witness, furthermore, not only to the application of ideas to the practical spheres of government and ordered society, but also to the maintenance of legal training to some degree, even if those versed in the law or acting as judges did so as part of a package of other administrative, martial or ecclesiastical obligations.
The wider context of such legal provision, as the prologue to the eighth-century redaction of the Lex Salica and the Lex Baiuuariorum make clear … was a wish on the part of the Germanic kings both to emulate the literary and legal aspects of the Roman and Judaeo-Christian culture to which they were heirs, and to reinforce the links that bound a ruler or dynasty to his people. But we also witness the coincidence of an appreciation in many different parts of western Europe of the practical significance of the written word in relation to the exigencies of enforcing justice. The ideological, symbolic and practical functions of the law are all intertwined and interdependent. Those concerned with government were … able to build on the work of the eighth-century rulers, lawyers and legal advisers.
The many endeavours in different branches of learning and technical skills that have been surveyed in this chapter mirror the formation of particular mental attitudes that were to have a profound influence in the subsequent centuries. A particular image and conception of the church and Christianity was formed … Efforts were being made in many different ways to understand God's purpose for his people. From the overwhelmingly biblical and patristic orientation of early medieval intellectual endeavour we gain a crucial indication of the formative influences and characteristics of early medieval religion and the institutional and intellectual frameworks established to support it. In the eighth century in particular, the tools were honed, methods refined, links joined and essential principles established for the exuberant manifestations of learning, thought and art in the later eighth and ninth centuries that are characterised as the 'Carolingian Renaissance'.
CONCLUSION
Charlemagne … the Carolingian ruler has been the symbol, rightly or wrongly, of European unity and the common cultural heritage of Europe. The Carolingian period and the role of Frankish political expansion and cultural imperialism have taken their place in the historiography of most European countries as an essential phase in those countries' development. … Not one region of the area we now think of as Europe was so self-contained as to remain entirely untouched by events in the Carolingian heartlands, even among those for whom the benefits of Carolingian rule may not have been either welcome or obvious. To this extent, therefore, the Frankish dominance of the historical evidence is not entirely unaccountable. It is arguable, however, that it was not so much the political successes and failures of the Franks, or those of their allies and supporters or opponents and enemies, which impinged most on the regions … Rather it is their political ideologies, methods of ruling, social organisation, economic innovations, religious zeal and intellectual and cultural traditions that have left their lasting legacy.
The principles embodied in Frankish kingship and royal administrative methods had rested on a relatively influential and homogeneous network of public institutions, inherited, ultimately, from the Roman empire. In many other respects, indeed, the Roman roots of early medieval public life are readily discernible, not least in the resort to the written word for records and in legal transactions. The unified currency system of the Carolingians, in which the Carolingian denarius was used throughout western Europe, became increasingly fragmented as the kings lost direct control over the various provinces. On a smaller scale and especially in England, however, the trend towards strong central control of the currency was maintained.
Trade on a local and inter-regional level, based on the agricultural, craft and industrial products of the great estates, and patterns of estate management with the manorial system as the peak of a developing economy, were the beginnings of the organisation that underpinned the later development of towns and merchants. Although a society dominated by and organised round the nobility, it was an agricultural society with the beginnings of social and functional differentiation, coherent local hierarchies, a considerable degree of social mobility, flexibility and informality, and characterised by personal associations of great, if overlapping, variety which formed an elaborate network of mutual obligation. As Wickham commented, ‘brute force remained an entirely normal element of social interaction', but there was also a strong sense of coherence and identity within settlements and a considerable degree of social and economic co-operation among the inhabitants. …
Within the public life of the areas ruled by the Franks, office holding, the provision of justice, the accretion of wealth and land and participation in government led to the successful integration of the aristocracy within the administrative structures of the kingdoms as well as laying the foundations for new political constellations of power, in the old moulds, in both the eastern and the western kingdoms. The Frankish exercise of power, like that of other rulers of the peripheral regions in the early middle ages, was one that depended above all on loyalty. This entailed the agreement to carry out orders without which government would have been inconceivable, and the bonds of mutual obligation and dependence existing between different individuals and groups. Such loyalty had its ritual expression in attendance at the assemblies convened by the king in which both lay and ecclesiastical magnates joined. At every level of society, moreover, women can be observed in influential roles within the royal household, the family, on the great estates, within communities and in the church. … They manifestly did not experience a decline in their position in the Carolingian period as is sometimes supposed. …
The reality underlying the order imposed or implied by so many of our sources, and their often symbolic representation of the present, most notably in 'court' historiography, was anything but tidy. Throughout our period, despite the efforts to maintain strong centralised government, there was tension between central and local powers as well as between centre and peripheries. The manifestation and exertion of power in the secular world … is also to be observed in the control, power and influence exerted by the church over, and over the church by, secular magnates and rulers. The identification of the ideals of rulership with those of a Christian ruler are of paramount importance. Further, the impact of the powerful on both the secular and inner worlds of the church and its monasteries led to tensions …. frequently in the years that followed.
… Yet the … power of prayer … was fully acknowledged and exploited by the laity, for they invested in this power to an extraordinary degree. We thus see not just ecclesiastical intrusion into secular life but also the reception of religious norms in every aspect of quotidian lay life. Political power was linked with spiritual and religious power: reform and expansion went hand in hand. Political leaders encouraged the reform of a church which was directed at the moral welfare of all their subjects, and thereby widened the brief for the state's intervention in the life of its subjects. …
… Rulers learnt to take an active interest in events to make their own distinctive contributions for the promotion of learning and education. … Carolingian learning, in all its variety and internal dissonances, was … at the heart of the intellectual and cultural legacy of the Carolingians to Europe as a whole. By the end of the ninth century … the role of the pictorial arts in religious practice in particular was established. It became accepted that art could embellish a holy place or object. In all the promotion of art, architecture and learning the ruler, and the personal patronage of other like-minded individuals, played a crucial role.
… It was Latin and Christian civilisation above all which provided the common links between Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England, Francia, northern Spain and Lombardy, Carinthia, Rome, Bulgaria and Scandinavia and elsewhere. Individuals moved throughout this world. Many, as we have seen with the Irish and English missionaries in Germany, the Irish, English, Lombard, Spanish, Greek and Italian scholars at the Frankish court, the Franks who established themselves in Italy and the Greeks who settled in the Exarchate of Ravenna, were able to uproot themselves. They made a life for themselves elsewhere in a way that questions the appropriateness of national boundaries in our assessment of the coherence of the early medieval world.
There is no doubt that the foundation for the wealth and variety of European civilisation was laid in these centuries … it remains the case that the years between 700 and 900, despite the varying fortunes of political conquest and territorial aggrandisement, were years of remarkably accelerated cultural and political formation, when ideologies and institutions were determined, social structures coalesced, and religious, intellectual and cultural traditions were established.
The Source:
Rosamond McKitterick, ‘Eighth Century Foundations’ and ‘Conclusion’, in The New Cambridge Medieval History, Volume II c.700-c.900, edited by Rosamond McKitterick, Cambridge University Press 1995 [2008] [pp. 681-682, 691-694, 845-848]
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